Intel at CES: All About Wearable, Mobile Computing Devices

Intel at CES: All About Wearable, Mobile Computing Devices

by Jeffrey Burt

Intel's Tiny Edison Computer

Krzanich holds up an Edison computer, which is housed in an SD card form factor and comes with built-in wireless. The computer, which is based on Intel's 22-nanometer Quark chips, can be the basis for a new wave of products. It will become available this summer, he said.

Quark Is the Power Behind Edison

Intel introduced the Quark family of chips at the Intel Developer Forum in September, targeting the small, low-power processors at the Internet of things and wearable devices.

Intel's New Smart Headset

At CES, Krzanich introduced a reference design for a hands-free, smart headset that can integrate with existing personal assistant technologies.

Charging Smart Devices the Easy, Fast Way

Intel's reference design for a smart wireless charging bowl can simultaneously charge the smart headset and other mobile devices by simply dropping them into the bowl.

Making the Smart Onesie Even Smarter

Rest Devices, which makes the Mimo smart baby onesie, is using the Edison computer to make the wearable monitor more efficient. With the Edison, all the functionalities were able to fit into a turtle-shaped sensor that is attached to a onesie, eliminating the need for an external receiver.

Coffee and Data, All in One Cup

Engineers at Intel Labs and Rest Devices created an Edison-based smart coffee mug with a display that shows the data generated from the smart baby onesie, which monitors the baby's vitals and analyzes the data.

Getting the Bottle Ready

Rest Devices' onesie also sends data to a smart bottle warmer that will start warming the milk when the onesie monitor senses the baby is awake and hungry. With Edison, Rest was able to reduce the size of the smart bottle warmer by half.

Creating More Responsive Computers

Mooly Eden, senior vice president and general manager for perceptual computing at Intel, holds the company's RealSense 3D camera, a tiny, integrated user-facing 3D camera that enables devices to see depth in a fashion similar to the human eye.

Looking at Computers That Look at You

On site at CES are early systems from Asus, Lenovo and Dell that come integrated with Intel's RealSense 3D camera.

Video Blogging on Background

Eden and Justine Ezarik show journalists and analysts at CES how the RealSense 3D camera will help video bloggers, including enabling them to remove their background to create a green-screen-like effect and create their own background. In this demonstration, Ezarik's background is the Las Vegas Strip rather than the stage at the Mandalay Bay hotel.

Switching Between Windows and Android

CEO Brian Krzanich demonstrated an Asus Transformer Book Duet (TD 300), a two-in-one device that can run both Windows and Android, with users being able to toggle between the two operating systems.

A running narrative for Intel in the past few years has been how the chip maker, which has long dominated the PC and server businesses, missed out on the booming market for mobile devices, particularly smartphones. Since becoming CEO in May 2013, Brian Krzanich moved to ensure that Intel isn’t caught flat-footed again and created a division for new devices and diving headlong into ultra-portable computing, new PC form factors, the Internet of things and wearable devices. Much of that was on display Jan. 6, when Krzanich gave his keynote at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. He showed off new reference designs for smart earbuds and headsets, a computer based on Intel's new Quark chip family that fits onto a Secure Digital (SD) memory chip, a user-facing 3D camera and notebooks that can toggle between Windows and Android. Wearable computing devices promise to become a booming market in the next few years, but for that to happen, they need to include features people want and that will help solve problems they're facing, Krzanich said. The best way to address this is by making everything smart, he said, and Intel wants to be the foundation of all those smart devices. (Photos by Intel)